arXiv Computation and Language

Data-Efficient Language Modeling: From Frontier Advancement to Principle-Guided Model Improvement

The paper reports a data‑efficient language modeling study conducted by Qiushi Engine on the BabyLM 2026 Strict‑Small benchmark, using only 10 million corpus words and 100 million cumulative presentations. It describes a three‑stage research program: Stage I built a frontier model via compact restatements and incremental learning; Stage II identified that exact repetition versus aligned restatement affect context use and proposed a principle for organizing experience around contextual dependencies; Stage III applied selective supervision and preservation techniques, achieving a modest overall score increase from 42.02 to 42.25 and the highest public Strict‑Small result as of 8 September 2026. The work also discusses further studies on compression, relational anchors, shared representations, and measurement, and makes models and code publicly available.

arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

It's All Training: A Fully Synthetic Single-Stage Recipe for LLMs

arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...

By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
arXiv AI
Sep 3

DKL: Decoupled Knowledge Learning for Instruction-Tuned Language Models

The paper introduces DKL, a method for adding new knowledge to instruction‑tuned language models without compromising their instruction‑following abilities. DKL performs extended pre‑training on a base LLM to embed knowledge, then merges these weights into the instruction‑tuned model, avoiding costly instruction fine‑tuning. Experiments show DKL raises RAG accuracy from 54.17% to 79.26% on retrieval failure cases while using far less training data than previous approaches.

By Kushagra Bhushan, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, Sai Krishna Reddy Sathi, Gaurav Pandey, Sonam Gupta, Vineet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Yatin Nandwani, Sachindra Joshi, Dinesh Raghu
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Representation-Based Exploration for Language Models: From Test-Time to Post-Training

arXiv:2510. 11686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model.

By Jens Tuyls, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Jordan T. Ash
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Highlight-Then-Summarize: Learning to Compress Evidence for Long-Context Understanding

The paper introduces Highlight-Then-Summarize (H2S), a two-step approach that first highlights question-relevant evidence in long documents and then condenses it into a compact, question-conditioned summary before generating an answer. The authors built the H2S-Dataset with 6,647 examples spanning 11 benchmark families, and developed H2S-RL to reward evidence selection and summary construction. Evaluated on the H2S-Bench suite, the H2S-14B model outperforms larger open-source models, achieving the highest overall score and maintaining strong performance even with a reduced output budget.

By Zhaoyuan Xia (Peking University, Baidu Inc), Qinghongbing Xie (Tsinghua University), Yung Xiang Hue (Tsinghua University), Jianguang Jiang (Baidu Inc), Gaofeng Lu (Baidu Inc), Zhenyu Jiao (Baidu Inc), Xing Yuan (Baidu Inc), Dai Dai (Baidu Inc), Tong Mo (Peking University), Long Zeng (Tsinghua University)
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 21

Sub-Billion, Super-Frontier: Small Language Models Rival Zero-Shot Frontier LLMs on General and Literary Relation Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong relation extraction (RE), but their computational demands and reliance on proprietary APIs limit deployment in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive settings. We investigate how far small language models (SLMs) can close this gap across general-domain and literary text.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Relational Attention for Data-Efficient Language Modeling

Relational BabyLM is a decoder‑only Transformer that replaces standard self‑attention with a Dual Attention Transformer (DAT) to separate object‑level lexical features from structural/relational information. The model incorporates a Next‑Latent Prediction objective to compress history into a dense belief state and introduces a RoPE‑based symbol‑retrieval mechanism. On the BabyLM 2026 challenge, the best model ranks 6th overall and 3rd on the NLP‑task subset, outperforming GPT‑2 on most benchmarks and achieving the highest EWoK score among strict‑track entries.

By Adrian Brasoveanu, Ece Takmaz, Jakub Dotla\v{c}il